Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Using environment git trees

Despite the confusing title, this is not tree-hugger territory ;)

I have two main machines and several test boxes. More often than not, I end up installing a new machine and get new home directory. This is annoying, because I've gotten quite used to my zsh setup, my vim customisations and all the other little tweaks my systems have accumulated over the years.

Somewhen around last year, this really started pissing me off so I set up a git tree for all those configurations, but I have now split that git tree into two trees: one called environment and one called shellenv.

All this does is to symlink the target file with the current file (provided if the target does not exist). The script used in my environment tree is a tad more complicated since it takes hostnames into account to populate the various /etc directories as well but you get the gist.

The result of all that? I can install a new test machine, run git clone and ./setup.sh and the machine has my shell environment. I get a new actual machine (or I update any of my local configuration) and I can run git clone or git pull and all my main boxes have the identical setup. Do try this at home.

Note: I know there are a few bugs in the symlink scripts. I always run them the same way though, they work for me and it's not really worth my time right now to try to make them perfect